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What art is there, what method, what discipline to bring us
there where we must go?
The Term at which we must arrive we may take as agreed: we have
established elsewhere, by many considerations, that our journey
is to the Good, to the Primal-Principle; and, indeed, the very
reasoning which discovered the Term was itself something like an
initiation.
But what order of beings will attain the Term?
Surely, as we read, those that have already seen all or most
things, those who at their first birth have entered into the
life-germ from which is to spring a metaphysician, a musician or
a born lover, the metaphysician taking to the path by instinct,
the musician and the nature peculiarly susceptible to love
needing outside guidance.
But how lies the course? Is it alike for all, or is there a
distinct method for each class of temperament?
For all there are two stages of the path, as they are making
upwards or have already gained the upper sphere.
The first degree is the conversion from the lower life; the
second- held by those that have already made their way to the
sphere of the Intelligibles, have set as it were a footprint
there but must still advance within the realm- lasts until they
reach the extreme hold of the place, the Term attained when the
topmost peak of the Intellectual realm is won.
But this highest degree must bide its time: let us first try to
speak of the initial process of conversion.
We must begin by distinguishing the three types. Let us take the
musician first and indicate his temperamental equipment for the
task.
The musician we may think of as being exceedingly quick to
beauty, drawn in a very rapture to it: somewhat slow to stir of
his own impulse, he answers at once to the outer stimulus: as the
timid are sensitive to noise so he to tones and the beauty they
convey; all that offends against unison or harmony in melodies
and rhythms repels him; he longs for measure and shapely pattern.
This natural tendency must be made the starting-point to such a
man; he must be drawn by the tone, rhythm and design in things of
sense: he must learn to distinguish the material forms from the
Authentic-Existent which is the source of all these
correspondences and of the entire reasoned scheme in the work of
art: he must be led to the Beauty that manifests itself through
these forms; he must be shown that what ravished him was no other
than the Harmony of the Intellectual world and the Beauty in that
sphere, not some one shape of beauty but the All-Beauty, the
Absolute Beauty; and the truths of philosophy must be implanted
in him to lead him to faith in that which, unknowing it, he
possesses within himself. What these truths are we will show
later.
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